Hacker News: mre

New comment by mre in "Show HN: Apate API mocking/prototyping server and Rust unit test library"

mre — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 12:52:38 +0000

We use httpmock [1] for lychee, and it works quite well. Haven't looked too closely at the differences yet.

[1] https://docs.rs/httpmock/latest/httpmock/

New comment by mre in "Lego announces Smart Brick, the 'most significant evolution' in 50 years, no AI"

mre — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 17:17:20 +0000

https://archive.ph/wcArc

Base: SQLite Editor for macOS

mre — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 11:30:41 +0000

Article URL: https://menial.co.uk/base/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012700

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mre in "Self-employed, self-exhausted"

mre — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 11:28:18 +0000

As a counterpoint, I quite enjoyed the writing style. Not everything has to be summarized. To me, it was more about the human experience.

New comment by mre in "Domains I Love"

mre — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 21:21:03 +0000

My vote goes to .ws which redirects to a beer brand.

New comment by mre in "Idiocracy"

mre — Sat, 24 May 2025 12:22:49 +0000

Recently watched Mickey 17 and it reminded me a bit of Idiocracy. Maybe someone is looking for related movies.

New comment by mre in "Don't unwrap options: There are better ways (2024)"

mre — Wed, 14 May 2025 00:18:07 +0000

Fair point. Your wording was a bit strong, but I assume you meant well. I will update the article.

New comment by mre in "Don't unwrap options: There are better ways (2024)"

mre — Wed, 14 May 2025 00:15:56 +0000

Author here; thanks! I had the same impression, which is why I started writing these short-form articles about idiomatic Rust. The blog post overview is here: https://corrode.dev/blog/

New comment by mre in "Flattening Rust's learning curve"

mre — Wed, 14 May 2025 00:04:20 +0000

Do you mean `Arc>`? Yeah, I agree. Wrote a blog post on that topic as well: https://corrode.dev/blog/prototyping/ The title is a bit of a misnomer, but it's about beginner-friendly escape hatches in the language. Perhaps it's useful to newcomers.

New comment by mre in "Flattening Rust’s learning curve"

mre — Tue, 13 May 2025 23:48:53 +0000

The thing is, once you internalized the concepts (ownership, borrowing, lifetimes), it's very hard to remember what made it difficult in the first place. It's "curse of knowledge" in some sense.

What's changed since 2015 is that we ironed out some of the wrinkles in the language (non-lexical lifetimes, async) but the fundamental mental model shift required to think in terms of ownership is still a hurdle that trips up newcomers.

New comment by mre in "Flattening Rust’s learning curve"

mre — Tue, 13 May 2025 23:43:33 +0000

For people who don't get the reference, this might be referring to the notoriously gnarly task of implementing a doubly-linked lists in Rust [1]

It is doable, just not as easy as in other languages because a production-grade linked-list is unsafe because Rust's ownership model fundamentally conflicts with the doubly-linked structure. Each node in a doubly-linked list needs to point to both its next and previous nodes, but Rust's ownership rules don't easily allow for multiple owners of the same data or circular references.

You can implement one in safe Rust using Rc> (reference counting with interior mutability), but that adds runtime overhead and isn't as performant. Or you can use raw pointers with unsafe code, which is what most production implementations do, including the standard library's LinkedList.

https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

Flattening Rust's Learning Curve

mre — Mon, 05 May 2025 16:56:37 +0000

Article URL: https://corrode.dev/blog/flattening-rusts-learning-curve/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43897098

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Peering into the Linux Kernel with Trace

mre — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 12:29:48 +0000

Article URL: https://alexdowad.github.io/peering-in-the-kernel-with-trace/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43663817

Points: 78

# Comments: 3

New comment by mre in "The best programmers I know"

mre — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 20:47:39 +0000

It's true that he no longer steers the project, but his first version shaped the internet as we use it today. At least one could how a modern version of a similar idea would look like. What has changed since then? Which issues should be fixed? You might end up with Deno or perhaps WebAssembly or something else entirely, but it definitely helps to know the people behind the tools we use every day.

New comment by mre in "The best programmers I know"

mre — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 20:47:15 +0000

In my book that's not a guess, but a hypthesis, which is indeed a great way to narrow down the problem space. What I meant was to avoid blind guessing in the hope of striking luck, which comes back to haunt us most of the time.

New comment by mre in "The best programmers I know"

mre — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 20:28:01 +0000

The creator matters because they are the key to understand the reason was created in the first place and under which circumstances. You get to learn about their other work, which might also be relevant to you, the limitations of the tool based on the problem is was designed to solve, and the broader ecosystem at the time of creation. For example, if you're a frontend developer it helps to know who Brendan Eich is, where he worked when he invented JavaScript, and what Netscape wanted to achieve with it. You would even learn a bit about the name of the language.

Similarly, it helps to know who maintains the code you depend on. Is there even a maintainer? What is the project roadmap? Is the tool backed by a company or otherwise funded? What is the company's mission? Without those details, there is a supply chain risk, which could lead to potential vulnerabilies or future technical debt.

New comment by mre in "The best programmers I know"

mre — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 20:05:46 +0000

Author here. That's the answer.

Or at least it used to be the answer when I still cared about analytics. Nowadays, friends send me a message when they find my stuff on social media, but I long stopped caring about karma points. This isn't me humblebragging, but just getting older.

The longer answer is that I got curious about Cloudflare workers when they got announced. I wanted to run some Rust on the edge! Turns out I never got around to doing anything useful with it and later was too busy to move the site back to GH pages. Also, Cloudflare workers is free for 100k requests, which gave me some headroom. (Although I lately get closer to that ceiling during good, "non-frontpage" days, because of all the extra bot traffic and my RSS feed...)

But of course, the HN crowd just saw that the site was down and assumed incompetence. ;) I bury this comment here in the hope that only the people who care to hear the real story will find it. You're one of them because you did your own research. This already sets you apart from the rest.

New comment by mre in "The best programmers I know"

mre — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 19:46:27 +0000

Author here. The site was down because I'm on Cloudflare's free plan, which gives me 100k requests/day. I couldn't care less if the site was up for HN, honestly, because traffic costs me money and caches work fine. FWIW, the site was on Github Pages before and it handles previous frontpage traffic fine. So I guess if there were any irony in it, it would be about changing a system that worked perfectly well before. My goal was to play with workers a bit and add some server-side features, which, of course, never materialized. I might migrate back to GH because that's where my other blog, corrode.dev, is and I don't need more than that.

New comment by mre in "The Best Programmers I Know"

mre — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 17:02:59 +0000

Sorry, it's fixed now.

New comment by mre in "Pitfalls of Safe Rust"

mre — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 03:15:46 +0000

True, I should add the wrapping types. They are actually quite useful if you know that you have a fixed range of values and you can't go above the min/max. Like a volume dial that just would stay at "max" if you turn up the volume; it wouldn't wrap around.